From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: How the Impetus of the Haitian Revolution Changed Throughout the Revolutionary Process

Abstract

In recent decades scholars have established the Haitian Revolution as a momentous historical event alongside the other canonical Atlantic revolutions. The Haitian Revolution was distinctive, however, because it was the only slave revolt in the Americas to overcome European colonial governance and found an autonomous state. This extraordinary event erupted out of the extreme societal conditions in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Supported by France, the plantocracy dominated the colony through mass enslavement and political exclusion of the colony’s free population of colour. These two structural conflicts determined the revolutionary process. Initially, the political and economic conflict between intransigent white Dominguans and aspirational free Dominguans of colour resulted in a civil war and as this conflict destabilized the fragile structure of colonial oppression the enslaved population seized control of the revolutionary process.